The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (21 page)

“But don't you see, my friend?” asserted Father. “It's all over. The Russia we loved, the Russia not of pogroms and police but of a culture so remarkable and tender the world has never known its like,
that
Russia has ceased to exist. I shall never return. I shall never cooperate with the Soviet regime. Nor shall I ally myself with the Social Revolutionaries, as you so foolishly propose. They've already indicated their unwillingness to work with the Cadets. Your uprising of the peasants is, alas, little more than wishful thinking.”

“Ah, my dear Vova. Beware exile's bitter allure. It tempts you into fatalism. Russia is lost only if we say she is lost.”

“She is lost,” said my father. “We must give her up the way the Jews long ago gave up Jerusalem. For us as well: the Diaspora.”

“Not all the Jews have given up Jerusalem. Even as we speak, Zionists by the hundreds are reentering the Promised Land.”

“And their efforts will end in folly and worse.”

“But you're a friend of the Jews. The Jews have no greater friend than you.”

“Yes,” said my father, “I'm a great friend of the Jews.”

I had never before heard Father speak in such a pessimistic vein, and he seemed aware of the gloom he had cast on our table.

“But enough of this,” he said. “We must remember how very much we should be thankful for. We have our health, our happiness, we've kept our souls intact, we're surrounded by the ones we love. And around this humble table”—here his tone began to change from one of heartfelt seriousness to mock-academic grandiosity—“we possess an almost endless fund of knowledge. In the best spirit of our Soviet brethren who believe that everything must proceed collectively, let us endeavor to tap into that knowledge. Comrades, we must adapt to the future! I shall ask the first question of Volodya. If you'd
be so kind as to divulge to us, Comrade Lody”—he paused portentously—“what was the name of the Pomeranian in the famous Chekhov story?”

Volodya did not hesitate. “The lapdog is nowhere named. Unless”—he smiled to himself—“one wishes to consider that its name is Gurov.”

Father nodded appreciatively. “Excellent. Proceed.”

Volodya scanned the table. His gaze lingered on me. “Seryosha, what name did Achilles take when he hid among the women?”

Years of practice had honed my skill at fielding these rounds of questions. Some were spurious; others led to real answers. No one at the table was immune. The questions came fast and furious.

“Describe Plyushkin's garden in
Dead Souls
.”

“What did Napoleon say when he crowned himself emperor?”

“Who was the world champion in chess before Lasker?”

“What caterpillars feed on privet leaves?”

“The Astapovo Station, where Tolstoy died, was located at the intersection of what train routes?”

This breakneck game of sense and nonsense invariably cheered my father up. His face flushed with pleasure, his tired eyes regained their old glitter. My mother looked from guest to guest with nervous solicitude, sometimes crying out, “But that is too diabolical!” when she felt someone had been unfairly interrogated.

I saw that Miliukov sat perplexed, hoping he might be forgotten amid all these familial fireworks. Chain-smoking Hessen, on the other hand, seemed thoroughly amused; he kept my mother, who sat next to him, and whom Father often scolded for smoking too much, supplied with expensive Gold-flakes which he tipped out in a steady stream from their yellow packet.

Having answered correctly, and with quiet triumph, the most recent of Father's questions (“Kozlov-Volovo and Moscow-Yelets”), Volodya turned his attention to Olga.

I had seen relatively little of my sisters in recent years. While Elena had blossomed into a poised, lovely girl, Olga had grown strange and moody, a flower bud clenched tight. Often she stared distractedly into space, and hummed monotonous snatches of melody. She read widely in Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophists. When Volodya asked her, “What books had Emma Bovary read?” she shrank into herself and glared blackly at him.

“Of course you've read
Madame Bovary
?” he prompted when no response was forthcoming. “Our esteemed Mademoiselle Hofeld hasn't neglected your education to that degree, I presume?”

“You quite liked the book, didn't you?” said Mlle. Hofeld helpfully.

“A single title will suffice,” taunted my brother.

“The Brother Who Died
,” said Olga between clenched teeth. “An execution in three volumes by Olga Vladimirovna.”

“Sorry,” said my brother. “Your choices were—”

Father intervened; resorting to a time-tested method, he threw pellets of bread across the table to try to cheer her up, but this time it had no effect. Olga burst into tears, and rose from the table in a fury. “I hate you!” she cried. “I hate everybody in this cruel family! I wish you all would die!” Throwing down her napkin, she ran sobbing from the dining room.

Across the table, Svetlana's squirrel eyes gazed steadily at mine, a connection we did not break for several seconds as the general commotion around the table rose (“Olga, my dearest,” Father called after her) and gradually subsided (my mother and Mlle. Hofeld excused themselves and hurriedly followed Olga from the room). What Svetlana wished to communicate, exactly, I do not know: what I saw in her gaze was alarm, disapproval,
a sense that her worst, unnamed fears about her lover and his fantastical family had somehow been confirmed.

None of us could know that this would be the last evening we would all be together.

 

The next day I slept late, and read a bit from
Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes,
which I was quite enjoying despite my brother's belief that it was not literature at all but only a crude attempt at social history. In the evening I went out to the Adonis Club. The mood there was uncommonly festive. The center of attention was a stocky, middle-aged gentleman, fashionably dressed and sporting a prodigious walrus mustache of the kind in vogue among a certain generation of Germans. Flanking him like bodyguards sat two muscular young men, one short-haired and blond, the other a brunette, both looking as if they had come directly to the club from a boxing ring. Hovering about was a girlish-looking lad whose long bony hands fluttered with even greater alacrity than his long dark eyelashes.

“Come to Papa.” The mustachioed gentleman patted his lap, and obediently the flitting youth perched there. I recognized one of the men at the table as Bruno, with whom I had had several amiable conversations on other occasions; he recognized me as well, and motioned for me to join the group.

I asked him what was being celebrated.

“Oh, but you don't know? It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Dr. Hirschfeld”—he nodded toward the mustachioed guest of honor—“is being fêted far and wide. He's the toast of the town these days.”

I told him that, regrettably, I knew nothing of the committee nor its work, and reminded him that I was seldom in Berlin.

“Then you must learn about us. We're a group dedicated to the repeal of Paragraph 175.”

I asked politely of what this paragraph consisted.

“Dear God,” he said. “You really are a stranger. Dr. Hirschfeld
is a great pioneer in the realms of human freedom. Our petition's been signed by some very prominent men. Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Gide, Albert Einstein. The tide of history is with us, and we may be proud that Germany has proved the most enlightened of all nations in regard to the advancement of human sexual liberty. Our future here is very bright indeed!”

Hirschfeld himself, at the far end of the table, held forth, richly and fervently, for some time. I cannot now fully recall all that he said, but I remember that he ended by declaring, in his gruff and kindly baritone, the resolute voice of a general, “We are citizens not of a nation but of the world, Plato's invincible army of lovers. What a tomorrow awaits us,
mein Kinder
. Nothing—nothing!—shall keep us from our destiny.”

I could not help but contrast his words with Father's melancholy prognosis of our émigré plight the night before. I wondered if Father knew of this Dr. Hirschfeld, and determined to ask him at the next opportunity. It might even provide us with an occasion to address certain aspects of my life he seemed set on ignoring.

Just as the political conversation chez Nabokov had given way to fun and games, so merriment in the Adonis Club also became general once the doctor had finished speaking. A small band of musicians began to puff and wheeze its way through a polka. Had the Germans not yet heard of jazz? Some couples danced. I found myself talking to a curly-haired tailor who told me proudly that he specialized in reconfiguring military uniforms into evening wear. When he began to disparage the Russians flooding the city and undercutting honest men's wages, I was relieved to be able to pass for English. Had it not been for his attractively upturned nose I would have turned heel and walked away. But it amused me, as did something humorous in his blue eyes, and I resolved to kiss him before the night was through.

He wished to introduce me to a chap who'd been to
England once, and I obliged, seating myself at a table slick with spilled beer while the fellow regaled us with a preposterous story involving the Victoria and Albert Museum and an Egyptian mummy. My tailor—I believe Maximilian was his name—contented himself with massaging my thigh with his large hand. It was all very jolly, even if I do dislike the smell of beer and cigar smoke, and the inane drivel that is polka music. I watched Dr. Hirschfeld move with great ceremony about the room, stopping here and there to receive congratulations from well-wishers.

“Tante Magnesia is in her element tonight,” drawled the fellow who had been to England.

“Oh, don't be rude,” Maximilian told him. “Not everyone appreciates the professor's work,” he explained to me. “
Some
small people are positively jealous.”

“Why should I be jealous of a self-aggrandizing old queen who abuses her medical privileges for the sake of bedding clueless young thugs? It's reprehensible, really.”

“My, we've developed a stern case of morals since we returned from London. Is the fog there really so thick that it clouds one's libido?”

I could see that these two had for far too long been sparring partners.

Impatient, I asked if I could have a word with Maximilian alone.

Maximilian shot his friend a haughty look. I took him around the corner to an alley and proceeded to kiss him. It was nothing but a lark, that kiss, harmless mischief of the sort I had been pursuing with some vigor since my arrival in the city ten days before. Unlike London, which was all great innocent fun but little more, Berlin invited one into more immediately naughty embraces.

My new acquaintance seemed at first startled and then gratified by my assertiveness, and he answered in kind.

What happened next is difficult to describe. Even as I relished the taste of his mouth, the firm organ that was his tongue, his buttock-clutching tailor's hands, there suddenly descended on me a desolation so profound that even now I shudder to recall it. The feeling lasted scarcely a moment, but in that moment all satisfaction in kissing this pleasingly available Berliner with the snub nose evaporated. He seemed surprised by the abrupt cessation of my advances, even going so far as to mutter, “Hey, what funny business is this?” as I broke our embrace and thrust him from me.

I told him I had forgotten an appointment of paramount importance. All I knew, with eerie certainty, was that I must at once go home.

“Well that's a fine thing, for sure,” my snubbed companion complained. “Leaving a poor fellow in the lurch. My friend always warned me the English have no real manners.”

“Russian,” I corrected as I hurried away.

At Nollendorfplatz I waited some minutes for a streetcar, but as none was forthcoming, and my agitation had not abated, I began to walk.

Somewhere along the Hohenzollerndam my arrival at a streetcar stop coincided with the approach of a tram, and I gratefully boarded the empty car that would speed me homeward. The conductor wore frayed gray gloves, and swayed drunkenly as he made his way up the aisle to where I sat.

I calmed a bit. My strange sense of urgency seemed absurd, and I set about thinking how I meant to scold Olga for using such uncommonly violent language at the table the night before. It was bad luck to say such things, and she of all people should know better. From Olga my thoughts turned to my German tailor, toward whom I had behaved abominably, and who no doubt was now besmirching me to his colleagues at the Adonis Club, perhaps even to Dr. Hirschfeld, about whom I really must remember to ask Father….

I am recounting all this in some detail, as it is, even to this day, etched with awful clarity in my memory.

I got off the tram at Sächsischestrasse and walked the remaining few blocks. Outside my parents' building I passed the elderly gentleman who nightly patrolled the neighborhood, tapping at the curb with his cane, ever on the lookout for discarded cigarette butts.

A sepulchral quiet greeted me as I entered our flat—and yet the room was far from empty. Several of Father's friends—Hessen, Kaminka, Shtein, Yakolev, all of whom must have returned with him from Miliukov's speech at the Philharmonie—sat silently. Hessen had been handing around cigarettes when I walked in, but froze when he saw me. No one spoke a word. I noticed that the men looked pale and exhausted. Father had said last night, after Miliukov left, that his speech was sure to be dreadfully dull—but had it been as bad as that?

Mother raised herself from the divan where she had been reclining.